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Re: The cost of accessibility

for

From: Denis Boudreau
Date: Oct 5, 2010 8:06AM

Hi Peter,


On 2010-10-04, at 5:28 PM, Peter Krantz wrote:

> How do you define "website"?

A group of web pages tagged usgin HTML or XHTML, linked together in a coherent structure, hosted on a web server and consulted using a user agent under the http or https protocol?

What I mean is going the extra mile so the contents we're providing when building that thing is accessible to all (or at least, to the broader audience possible because it's never perfect).


> Are you looking at all the work involved in getting a website up and
> running? Setting up a publishing platform that is "accessible" from a
> technical perspective (templates etc) can be a very small effort.
> Building a website that is "accessbile" by some definition can require
> a lot of work. Will you hire someone to subtitle your video clips?
> Are you looking at accessibility for content producers as well?

Those are all good questions.

The efforts could include subtitling videos, transcripting audio, providing alternative content to flash based elements that could not be made accessible otherwise or any combination thereof.

Of course, the more complex or media rich a project is, the more important the accessibility efforts become. Which is exactly my point.

I tend to believe that my estimates of 2 to 5% are probably good if the "dream team" doing this is experienced, because they'll have the skills to do these things. Accessible scripting (AJaX or whatever) is not so complicated either if your programmer understands the DOM, and knows how to test what he's doing with a screen reader and his keyboard. It's only a matter of understanding how to best use the tools at your disposal.

If the designers know how to use Flash so its compatible with assistive technologies, video producers know how to caption their movies, content producers can export their content in appropriate accessible formats, front-end developers know how to efficiently implement WCAG, etc. then it's safe to assume it's because these people have adapted their practice in order to make it more usable for a broader audience. This includes people with various disabilities that may hinder their capacity to access contents.

Given all these web specialists have adapted their practice, we can assume they've optimized it along the way. Some things might be faster to do than before and others might require a little more time. After all, throwing an additional attribute here and there or testing with a screen reader takes a little more time than not doing it at all.


> I believe it is impossible to calculate a generic cost of
> accessibility for a "website".

I disagree. Everything can be measured, even if the measure is not perfectly accurate.

The efforts required by accessibility, however important or noble they may be, do add up to something. By throwing a ballpark estimate of 2 to 5%, I'm saying a 50k project would require anywhere from 1k to 2.5k for the accessibility adaptations.

It seems to me these figures make sense if you have a skilled team at your disposal, but would necessarily explode if the team had never even thought a blind person could surf the web.

--
Denis Boudreau
Téléphone : +1 514.730.9168
Courriel : <EMAIL REMOVED>